Surfacing interesting tweets

As the number of users and user engagement on twitter grows, a lot more people are commenting and citing content from the web and sharing it on twitter. While this provides very valuable content it also results in information overload – for eg. with close to 1000 or more tweets about a link how do I find the most interesting tweets? What were the most interesting comments on a link that I posted?

Topsy can help you answer all these questions, by extracting the most popular and unique tweets for a particular URL ( could be a link, photo or video ). Topsy extracts the unique tweets and using various signals which include : volume, influence and velocity identifies the most important/popular tweets. This can be viewed now both via topsy.com as well as our extracted using out API.

On topsy.com we have started introducing the concept of “interesting tweets” on trackback pages where the volume of tweets is beyond a specific threshold.

To enable our developer and partner ecosystem to extract value from this we also introduced it via our API – /populartrackbacks. The API works similar to the others and lists the most popular and unique tweets that mention a particular URL. This proves to be very valuable for showing commentary on articles on your site – especially those with high tweet counts.